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Why Premiere Pro?
Premiere Pro is a fantastic tool to edit not only video but also to edit sound levels. With sound playing such an important role in your next video production or film it’s worth focussing in on what matters. Although treated as primarily a video editing tool, Premiere Pro also offers really great tools to get the best out of your audio files as well.
When you open you up Premiere pro you will see a place for putting your media files on the left hand side
known as bins. Below are the general steps to follow and what they look like inside the programme.
How do I start editing audio in Premiere Pro?
1. The first thing you want to do is import all of your video files and audio files into Premiere Pro.
2. Once you have all your files that you need for your project, drag the audio clips from your project bin onto the timeline. (You will notice that there are different colours on the timeline that denote different functions. One will be Vision and one will be audio.
3. You can cut, trim and sort out the audio clips on your timeline in any way you like.
4. You can also change the colour of yours clips and place them on different tracks to keep everything as tidy as possible.
5. By right-clicking on an audio clip you can also add different effects to the individual clips.
When you first place an audio clip onto the timeline, if the video clip has audio attached to it, you will notice that there are two tracks now sitting on your timeline. One denotes the vision and one denotes the associated audio and they will be both in what is called sync. Sync means that at any particular timecode (point in your video) the vision and audio will also match.
Editing Audio and Sound Levels
1. Unlinking Audio and Video
If you are wanting to separate the tracks so that your vision and audio is separate, you can unlink the clips so you can move them separately around your timeline. Bear in mind that this will put them out of sync but allows you to use the footage elsewhere on your timeline. You may want to use part of the vision but not necessarily the same audio. Do to this right click on the timeline over the clip and click unlink.
Control + L – Unlink audio and video for Windows
2. Adjusting Sound Levels
To edit sound levels in Premiere Pro you can right click the appropriate clip that you are wanting to adjust. Then scroll down on the menubar and select audio levels. This will give you a prompt. Click the option and reduce the audio levels in dB (decibel). It is a measurement used for measuring the relative loudness of sounds. One decibel (0.1 bel) equals 10 times the common logarithm of the power ratio.
One of the newish features in Adobe Premiere Pro is the ability to assign various tags for individual audio tracks on your timeline. Like the previous example you can assign a tag that gives reference to what that clip actually is. For instance the audio track could be dialogue so you can assign all your tracks that are dialogue so that they are the same loudness level.
3. Keyframe sound editing
What happens if you don’t want to adjust the level of audio for the entirety of each clip? Well, you can do this by adding in key frames. Keyframes allow you to change the audio levels over time. What this means is you can adjust the levels either up or down at various points on your selected clip. By dragging the volume level up and down you can alter the level of your audio over a given period of time.
To place a keyframe go to the point on your audio timeline in the track settings. In the effects control panel you will see a diamond looking symbol (keyframe) click this and you will see keyframes added to the nominal timeline. This will position your first keyframe. Scrub the timeline along to the point where you want the adjustment to finish and place your second keyframe. You can move the second keyframe either up or down to adjust the audio levels the way you like. This can also be used to fade out audio or raise the audio in important places. For instance say you want to lower your background music when a person begins to speak.
4. Things to look out for
You would have noticed that on your time line that there are a few different options when it comes to track layout. Each track doesn’t always mean one piece of audio. For instance one track just merely denotes a place to store audio. This could be mono (single track) recorded on one channel either the left channel or the right channel. Or recorded on both channels (stereo pairing). This is where both the channels are being recorded onto.
A common and easily fixed issue is if say you have mono audio ( one channel on the left for example). What you can do is select the channel that has been recorded on and simply untick the non used channel and duplicate the existing mono audio onto both the channels so in effect they will be coming out of both the left and right channels.
If you are wanting to have a further look at some great editing packages and get more information, have a look at the best video editing software for 2023.
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